Google had a challenging 2025 in the AI race, falling behind competitors like OpenAI. However, the launch of new Gemini models helped the company regain momentum. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis explained how the team adopted a ‘startup’ mindset to accelerate AI development and ship features faster. He also revealed that he talks daily with Google CEO Sundar Pichai about AI strategy.
Hassabis told a tech news outlet, “We pretty much talk every day about strategic things and where should the technology go, and what does the wider Google need.” This close collaboration has positioned DeepMind as the “engine room” powering Google’s AI technologies, which are then integrated across Google products. Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 and merged it with Google Brain in 2023.
Reflecting on Google’s past, Hassabis noted that although the company developed key AI architectures like Transformers in 2017, it was slower to commercialise AI compared to rivals. He said, “The last two, three years, I think we’ve had to come back to almost our startup or entrepreneurial roots and be scrappier, be faster, ship things really quickly and sort of make really rapid progress.”
The pressure to innovate is high due to competitors such as OpenAI, Amazon, Perplexity, and Anthropic. Hassabis called it a “ferocious competitive environment” and added that many tech veterans described it as “the most intense environment they’ve ever seen, perhaps ever in the technology industry.”
The push for speed has also translated into long workdays for some employees. Dmitry Lyalin, the product lead for Gemini, shared on X that he regularly attends six to ten hours of meetings daily to coordinate and deliver new AI features. Lyalin remained tight-lipped about what these updates include, writing, “I’m surviving 6-10 hours of meetings a day so that we can coordinate and deliver new @geminicli features such as…oh wait, I can’t say yet.”
Google’s adoption of a startup-style culture, paired with daily executive collaboration, appears to be central to its rapid AI development and Gemini rollout.
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